Yahoo & Meta Description / Meta Keywords

[John Scott]

I guess I set up a meta keywords and meta description test on my blog a while back - two years ago. But then I forgot about it.

Here's what I put in the index page:

<meta name="keywords" content="John Scott, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Brand, Branding, Idea, Thoughts, BrainDead, Brain Dead, Pepsi, Coke, Crack">
<meta name="description" content="John Scott's Internet Marketing Blog. Read inane, pointless braindead posts about branding, marketing and search engine optimization.">

Now I was checking these today, and the meta keywords and the meta description have no pull on Google whatsoever. Yeah, old news.

But on Yahoo I found:

Meta Keywords test:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Bra...psi+John+Scott

It actually outranks pages where that text appears on the page.

Meta Description test:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=poi...ad++John+Scott

Again, it outranks pages where that text appears on the page.

Seems that using the meta tags is still quite useful for ranking in Yahoo.

[aaron_nimocks]

Agreed,

I did this test awhile back when I couldnt seem to rank very well in Yahoo. I just looked at the source code for the first page results and they all had the keyword meta tag so I through mine in and started to climb again.

[NeO]

Wow John... That's quite a blog! interesting life, great insight, and well written... sounds like a movie

Also interesting how Yahoo treats those metas - I've found that MSN has been really after title tags... (same sort of tests)

NeO

[ToddW]

Testing for one of my sites now.

Going to see if it will put me back to #1, I`ve been hovering at ~5 all of 2005.

I`ve seen google use these results in serps under the url to the page.

[John Scott]

Originally Posted by neo1seo

Wow John... That's quite a blog! interesting life, great insight, and well written... sounds like a movie

Also interesting how Yahoo treats those metas - I've found that MSN has been really after title tags... (same sort of tests)

NeO

MSN is weird. They like index pages it seems, and don't give deep pages much weight. They don't give an ounce of weight to meta data either, IMO.

[I, Brian]

Word to the wise - check out this page for meta-data:
http://www.btopenworld.com

Why? BT and Yahoo! teamed up for broadband services in the UK, and Yahoo! apparently gave BT a list of guidelines for how to use meta-data most effectively.

[costa blanca]

Now i'm confused msn have taken all of my meta tags into consideration,
and its working well for me.

[costa blanca]

yahoo and Google is where i am struggling with the meta tags.

[solidghost]

This is pretty confusing. But at least it is good to know that meta tags can help with yahoo. But the question is why?

[Webnauts]

Few days ago we launched a tool providing very valuable information about meta tags and more.

Maybe will be worth to have a look: http://www.seoworkers.com/search-eng.../analyzer.html

[Sideways]

Thanks for making this post. I've been having some problems with yahoo only and maybe this is why.

[costa blanca]

I agree with webnauts, use that seo tool it will help you enormously.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by costa blanca

I agree with webnauts, use that seo tool it will help you enormously.

That is my tool. LOL

[costa blanca]

Well Done you.
its an excellent tool

[chillfire]

Bit of a story,
I bought a domain name tier1-workpermit.com a few weeks ago.
I have google analytics running on it and am posting 1 ad everynow and then on the gumtree.com to get traffic in as a test.

if I search yahoo for [tier1 work permit] I am number1!
google I come in top 10 with the gumtree ad.
I have had about 20 people on the site all together>
I have no links that I know of other than the posted advert ones....
I do have a number of links out to big uk government bodies to specific content pages, but none in..
I ran the seo tool listed above and I have no meta tags, but good % keywords?

If only it was this easy?

[Tanya]

I may be a litttttle off topic here but IMO you just have to remember that it's a bot that crawls your code and not a human, so you have to make it clear what you wanttaken note of.

I like to stick to these guidlines when setting any site up

<!-- start info -->
<!-- COPYRIGHT (C) ursite - all rights reserved -->
<!-- Designed by ursite graphics in city, country -->
<!-- Contact Name: you@ursite.com -->
<meta name="Publisher" content="">
<meta name="Publisher-Email" content="you@ursite.com">
<meta name="description" content="">
<meta name="keywords" content="">
<meta name="Identifier-URL" content="http://www.ursite.com/">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="# Days">
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL">
<link rel="ToC" href="http://www.ursite.com/index.html">
<link rel="Home" href="http://www.ursite.com/index.html">
<!-- end info -->

Just a little thing i researched...anyway, for some reason google and yahoo love me, so i will never complain lol

[Sideways]

Wow that looks clean. How long have you been using this ?

What do you typically put in for "revisit-after" ....seems like you would want everything visited often.

2 days ?

[Cricket]

<meta name="revisit-after" content="# Days">

Tanya, you know that this code is telling the bots NOT to visit you for X number of days, right?

[Webnauts]

I do not see any sense using these tags, as the SE either.

<meta name="Publisher" content="">
<meta name="Publisher-Email" content="you@ursite.com">
<meta name="Identifier-URL" content="http://www.ursite.com/">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="# Days">
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL">

And about the publisher, his/her mail, there are better solutions, than just hiding them from your visitors. Or do the SE care who the publisher or his/her email is?

And upon that, you are just adding redundant code to your pages, decreasing code to text ratio, and increasing their loading time.

Or have I missed something here?

[costa blanca]

i am not sure what sense it makes to use all of those meta tags,
please explain why you use them.